Home Sweet Home ???

Ms. Budget Travel is a wee bit grumpy this week because she has the travel-urge and she isn't going anywhere just now. Sprawling on her chaise lounge and sipping a soothing drink she is coping with the stress of stationary existence and considering the Great Truth that, for most of us, transportation is an enormous part of our Travel Expense. Alas! Those of us unwilling to hitchhike must needs buy a ticket to ride or fly or scoop out the change from the bottom of the backpack to put gas in the car, then, of course there are broken fan belts or time spent sipping coffee in a grotty truck stop . . .

So, Ms Budget Travel has been thinking of ways one can travel without leaving home.

Now, she knows, Gentle Readers, that you have all taken the odd day off work to clear out the garage, do your taxes or go to the dentist. Ms Budget Travel is not talking about vacation days; she's talking about travel, an altogether different topic. What we are discussing here is methadone for the travel junkie forced by cruel circumstance to stay in one place or close to it for a bit. Fortunately for her own sanity, Ms Budget Travel has come up with a list of helpful things to do when you can't leave the country . . .

Try to approach your hometown like a strange place. You know, don't you, that a flea market in Malta is quite enchanting even though they are only selling the same sad 8 track tapes and tacky leisure suits on offer in your home town. Well, go to a flea market in your own city, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Peruse the local paper for the sort of events that you would scurry off to if they occurred in Bruges or Berlin. (Ms Budget Travel has plans to do just that in the next few days.)

Go to local museums. We've all stared ourselves into near blindness looking at 17th century china somewhere we didn't speak the language well --- try it in your hometown. If not china, there must be the odd rock or ruin about; Ms Budget Travel is convinced that since Longmont, Colorado and Gastonia, North Carolina each have things vaguely like museums that no one is terribly far from one.

Read fiction about where you want to be. Sometimes Ms Budget Travel despairs of reading another wonderful travel guide to a place she is not going to see in the next few months, you see lately she's been leaning toward Thailand and she'd really like to go to the Middle East but then . . . and she is always fond of London, it's really like an affliction, this London-love . . . but when she reads what's on at the Victoria and Albert she starts to pout. Well, then Gentle Readers she finds that reading novels where the characters go where she'd like to be is a soothing remedy. Lately Ms Budget Travel has read tons of novels about London urban angst and the horrors of seeking a suitable mate in Islington and she's been quite happy. When Ms Budget Travel gets absorbed in a novel it's almost like she's there . . . double for writing fiction --- in Doomed to Repeat It Ms Budget Travel's novel, (you do see the link to Suite 101's interactive book circle do you not?) Ms Budget Travel set one scene in her very favorite restaurant in Edinburgh --- Ms Budget Travel couldn't get to Edinburgh at that moment, but she imagined the scene . . .

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